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SATA Raid - Matching Hard Drives

Spinman

Posted 29 July 2005 - 12:17 AM

How critical is it in these days of SATA raid to obtain a matching hard drive for Raid 0?

I currently have a 200g WD2000JD SATA drive and would like to setup a Raid-0 array.

Can I use a larger drive (and possible a different vendor) (giving me more versatility for future system reconfiguration)? Naturally the array would be limited to the smaller of the two drives....

Would the possible difference in read/write times be a problem? I'm sure there would be a theoretical performance difference by using 2 different drives - but in real world useage - would it really make any difference - speed wise or system damage wise? Is the drive controller confused when writing parallel data to two different drives?

I'm thinking of adding a Hitachi 250g or a WD 330g drive as a match to the 200. (presumably at some point in the future, I would upgrade the 200 to the larger capacity - if still available).

Technoguy

Posted 29 July 2005 - 09:00 AM

Technoguy

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172 posts

Joined 03-March 05

guys isn't raid 0 combined the drives in to 1 large one, you can use the full space of both... you're thinking of the other types where the drives back each other up that they have to be the same size.i think he's talkin bout raid1.correct me if i'm wrong

that means u take the size if the smallest drive, if u have a 120gig and an 80gig then u would take the 80gig, then u multiply that by the number of drives which is 2, so 2x80=160gigs

Instead of being an arrogant id*** and saying dont argue with you. Wouldnt it have just surficed to point him to a source?

Everyone is here to learn, so theres no need to be stuck up you own backside. You dont like it when Astalavista makes comments about you, do you?

@Thread starterbecause the array is being written across both disks, its at least best to get the same speed drives in terms of spin speed as the RAId array will be affected by slower disk as its latency (the time the disk spins to the read/write head) will be higher. Average seek time and such shouldnt make much difference.

However, with Raid0 (if thats what your intending on using) I would personally get the same drives as it offers no data security. Its not something I would risk unless your using your Raid0 as tempory - non important file storage.

Mekrel

Posted 29 July 2005 - 09:48 PM

im sorry but its just that i already had explained it but he still thought he was right

I appreciate that, but you learn something new everyday - theres no need to get angry because others have been misinformed, he happily said to correct him if he was wrong.

He could have got his info from a site which was wrong, it happens and Ive been misinformed before from sites because you think people who put information on thier sites have actually researched it... which isnt always the case.

My response to you was probably abit too heated, but this is a forum to learn and no one should attack each other. Im only a member on about 3 or so forums and MSFN is easiestly the place that I learn most about software.

atomizer

Posted 29 July 2005 - 09:58 PM

atomizer

Senior Member

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578 posts

Joined 24-December 04

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to elaborate on why it's more efficient to have the same size drives in a RAID 0 array (you already know why having the same type/speed is important), i can add that in this type of array, each file, program, whatever, is sort of divided in half. one half gets written to one drive and the other half to the second drive, so if one drive is larger than the other, then that extra space is simply wasted and, to my knowledge, there is no way to partition and use it because the OS (any OS) sees both drives as ONE drive. my only advice would be to not store important data across a RAID 0 array because, as has been mentioned, if one drive bombs, the other 50% of the data is 100% useless.

ripken204

Posted 29 July 2005 - 10:18 PM

ripken204

The Hardware Guy

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OS:Windows 7 x64

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thx mekrel for telling me to calm down and im rly sry technoguy, ive had a crappy day, im on about 5 hrs of sleep, my laptop has been screwed up and im trying to fix and im about to throw it out the window. as a member of this forum i have to respect others to make this community better.